Agents track funny money

ATLANTA Making fake money remains a thriving enterprise in the United States, as it has been since before the Civil War.

A few counterfeit artists still engrave metal plates and search for soft paper that approximates the government's proprietary blend. Others soak money in a chemical soup, rubbing off ink to create $100 bills out of fives.

But in more than two-thirds of all cases, criminals manipulate scanners, printers and toner ink to create money where once there was none.

Heath J. Kellogg, 36, whom the U.S. Attorney's Office here described as a self-taught graphic artist, is in the latter category.

Until federal agents arrested him in an Atlanta suburb in November, he was what people in his criminal circle called “the printer” – a man suspected of pumping more than $1.1 million in fake $50 bills into the Southern economy.

As counterfeiting cases go, Kellogg's is not a record-breaker. (Neither was one last year in which a 26-year-old Atlanta man used solvents and a printer to turn $5 bills into $100 bills, making $1.2 million in fake money.)

Still, a counterfeiting ring in which one man prints more than $1 million in fake money is no small deal. And catching Kellogg required a few lucky breaks for law enforcers, months of old-fashioned detective work and an ill-fated decision not to bail someone out.

“His bills were pretty good,” said Malcolm D. Wiley, an agent in the Atlanta Secret Service field office, who added that it was unusual to see fake 50s. A 20 is the most commonly counterfeited bill, followed by the $100 bill.

In addition to computer equipment and bits of partly burnt money found at Kellogg's home, agents found a newly purchased offset press in Kellogg's storage unit, according to documents in the case.

“They had a lot of confidence and thought they could do even better,” Wiley said of Kellogg and the five other people who have been charged with conspiracy to counterfeit currency.

Georgia, with its busy airport and postal distribution center, is better known for stolen Social Security and tax refund checks than for counterfeiting, but the state ranks third in that crime category. In 2011 a federal task force was formed to attack the problem. One of its biggest victories came last month when a postal supervisor pleaded guilty to stealing U.S. Treasury checks worth more than $3 million.

But the case of Kellogg was one of the South's bigger ones, and cracking it took months.

The first break came in May 2011, when an Atlanta-area bank sent the Secret Service several counterfeit bills that could be identified by missing numbers and other flaws.

Then, said Alana R. Black, the assistant U.S. attorney who is prosecuting the case, matching bills showed up in the summer of 2012 when the police in Conyers, Ga., arrested someone trying to pass 10 of Kellogg's fake $50 bills at a local business.

The person, who had a history of forgery convictions, became a confidential informant, telling investigators that $250 in legitimate money would buy $1,000 in fake bills.

The informant was also angry that Stacy P. Smith, 37, who was one of the six men who would later be charged in the counterfeiting conspiracy, did not provide bail as he had done after similar arrests. Names, cellphone numbers and physical descriptions of the suspected players in the ring poured forth.

In North Carolina and around the nation, more of the same fake bills showed up. Forensic analysis tied those bills to the Atlanta case.

Another person who had been arrested with counterfeit bills that agents connected to Kellogg then decided to help out. Conversations were monitored and cellphone records were obtained. The Secret Service arranged several “buy throughs,” watching as informants paid $900 for $2,000 in fake cash.

Agents traced toner purchases back to Kellogg and arrested a small group of men at a home improvement store in Woodstock, Ga. There they were using fake bills that agents believed came from Kellogg's workshop to buy things like alarm systems and then returning them for real money.

Natasha Perdew Silas, a federal public defender and Kellogg's lawyer, declined to comment. Like the others arrested, Kellogg has pleaded not guilty.

His father, James C. Kellogg, 63, was also charged, but his lawyer, William H. Thomas Jr., said the elder man's link to the case is tenuous. Prosecutors say the counterfeiting was a family enterprise, with father helping son glue bills together. Cans of spray glue found at the elder Kellogg's house support the conspiracy charge, they said.

But Thomas said that the elder Kellogg cuts lawns for a living, is ill and did not know of his son's dealings.

“Our investigation is going to show his son would come by and utilize the facilities,” he said.

The younger Kellogg has a history of arrests and convictions for passing bad checks, theft, forgery and escape that dates to 1994 in Georgia. Since leaving prison, he opened a graphic and Web design firm called Realseriousink, whose address is also his father's home in Marietta, Ga.

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